The Progressive Socialist Party is already busy circling the wagons around the veteran-murdering mess that is government “healthcare”, or the VA as they’re called in this particular case, howling their old shibboleths about how the “problem” with private sector healthcare or, indeed, private sector anything, is “greed.” Which the government is somehow magically free of.
We’ll take a break to allow for the howls of laughter to die down. Then we’ll tell you the one about the “greedy” oil companies versus the “beneficent” state. Who makes more off of a gallon of gas? Spoiler: It AIN’T Exxon Mobil.
The BlogFather, the Puppy Blender himself, has words about that socialist progressive nonsense:
And, ironically, a for-profit medical system might actually offer employees less room for greed than a government system. That’s because VA patients were stuck with the VA. If wait times were long, they just had to wait, or do without care. In a free-market system, a provider whose wait times were too long would lose business, and even if the employees faked up the wait-time numbers, that loss of business would show up on the bottom line. That would lead top managers to act, or lose their jobs.
In the VA system, however, the losses didn’t show up on the bottom line because, well, there isn’t one. Instead, the losses were diffused among the many patients who went without care — visible to them, but not to the people who ran the agency, who relied on the cooked-books numbers from their bonus-seeking underlings.
And, contrary to what Klein suggests, that’s the problem with socialism. The absence of a bottom line doesn’t reduce greed and self-dealing — it removes a constraint on greed and self-dealing. And when that happens, ordinary people pay the price. Keep that in mind, when people suggest that free-market systems are somehow morally inferior to socialism.
Yeah. Much like His Imperial Majesty, who has some apparently totally irrelevant personal, FIRST-HAND knowledge of socialism and socialist anything, has been saying for a decade and a half. At least. While shouting and pissing into the wind for all the good it has done.
Guess what?
WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!
Capitalist “greed.” Now that’s a good one. It’s really based on mankind in general (and progressive socialists in particular) having a strange idea of what “greed” is. Here’s what it’s NOT:
Somebody asking a lot of money for something, more than what you think is “reasonable”, is not “greed.” It’s somebody, if you’re right, that is, and your opinion about the asking price is shared by more than you and your pet rock, pricing themselves out of the market. Let’s be more specific. Let’s say that “somebody” is Joe. He’s very good at swinging a stick and hitting a ball. Problem is, Bob is just as good, and he wants only half as much as Joe. It doesn’t matter a brass obol whether Joe is asking for $20 million or a buck fifty a year, all that matters is that Bob can deliver the same good at half of that. That doesn’t make Joe “greedy”, it just makes him dumb. Or maybe he just believes that the time he needs to spend swinging that stick is worth $20 mil to him and Bob doesn’t.
It doesn’t matter. It’s not “greed.”
“Greed”, in one of the less grievously imbecilic definitions commonly used, means “demanding something more than what you’re offering is worth.” That’s still not true, it just means that you’re out of tune with the market you’re selling in, but we’ll play with that for a moment just for shits and giggles.
Because the “worth” of something is exactly equal to what somebody else is willing to pay for it. It doesn’t matter a bit if you think that $20 mil/year is “too much” for having a grown man swinging a bat if somebody is willing to pay him that to do so. And him asking that somebody to pay just exactly what he’s willing to pay is not “greed”, it’s called a “business deal.” If the buyer is unhappy with that price, then he has only himself to blame because he didn’t have to make that deal. It’s not Joe being greedy, it’s the buyer being a damn moron.
No. Greed is demanding something that you’re not entitled to, that you haven’t earned. Joe is offering something. It’s up to everybody else to decide what they want to pay him for it, but the fact remains that he’s the one swinging the bat. He learned that, he got good at it, and he’s offering his services. Or Joe could be a manufacturer of dildos, for all that we care. Thing is: He made those dildos, and it’s up to the buyers to decide what they want to pay for them. If he’s asking $1,000 a pop and somebody’s willing to pay it, he’s not “greedy”, he just knows what the market will bear. Sit&Go ilgalaik? automobili? nuoma Because if he’s asking too much, even if dildos turn out to be a vital commodity without which none may survive, somebody else will make a cheaper dildo.
Greed is demanding stuff for something you did not do a damn thing to bring about.
And you know who’s very, very good at demanding payment for something that they did fuck all to achieve?
Government, that’s who. Just how many government workers were involved in drilling that oil that “greedy” Exxon Mobil are daring to ask money for?
Zero. Much like the number of brain cells inhabiting the collective skulls of all liberal progressive socialists on the planet.
Yet the government makes out like a bandit on every sale of a gallon of gas while Exxon Mobil gets a fraction of that.
THAT’S greed, and nobody does it better than government.
The government takes a chunk out of your paycheck every two weeks, if you’re lucky enough to still have a paycheck in this socialist “paradise” that the Obamarrhoid voters created. Let’s say they “only” take 15% of it, net. Did they do 15% of your job? Did you have a bunch of fat, overpaid, underworked government parasites show up at your place of work and say “take an hour and 12 minutes off, I got this?”
Did they?
No. They didn’t. Yet the government still feels entitled to the earnings of 72 minutes of every workday of yours.
That’s greed.
“Oh, but they do deliver something. Like national defense!”
Sure. And we do have to pay for that or we’ll end up working for different masters although, at this point, it’s getting harder and harder to see how that would be a worse deal than what we’ve got right now. Slaving for Harry Reid or slaving for Vladimir Putin? You make the call. But we digress.
But who’s making the real money on the national defense side? Our soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen or, say, the REMFs at the VA? The same VA busy murdering veterans by the bushel load to “earn” bonuses for themselves with no accountability at all? Unless you consider “early retirement with full bennies and no penalties” accountability. And that’s on the off chance that they get caught.
Those government paper-pushing, fat, corrupt, incompetent, borderline imbeciles at the VA top make salaries well into 6 digits a year.
How much does your cousin, currently on his third deployment to the sandbox, make a year? And keep in mind that if he fucks up, he won’t be facing “early retirement to spend more time with his family in his 6 bedroom mansion”, he’ll be facing death. Or, if he’s really fucked by Fortuna, an injury and consequent euthanasia at the hands of the VA.
All of it government. And private companies are “greedy?”
To summarize: If a private company charges too much for inadequate services, it faces bankruptcy. If the government does the same thing, they face, at worst, nothing and, more likely, a raise as their budget is raised because their murderous incompetency is, obviously, due to “insufficient funding.”
Yet none dare call the government greedy.
Fuck them.
Thatisall.